Darkness and LightRichard Gid Powers. - Review - book reviews

National Review, Dec 20, 1999

Mr. Powers is the author of Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover and Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism.

Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind, by David Cesarani (Free Press, 646 pp., $30)

IF capturing the world's imagination and moving it to action are any measure of a writer's importance, there were moments when Arthur Koestler's voice was the most important of the century. A staggeringly productive author, Koestler was also staggering in the range of his political activities-a Zionist and anti-Zionist, Communist and anti- Communist, to name just a few of his most important causes, sometimes arguing pro and con at the same time. He inveighed for animal rights, against capital punishment, and, after a lucrative career as one of the bestselling scientific popularizers of the day, he spent the last 30 years of his life proselytizing for an "alternative" science of the paranormal. His final cause was voluntary euthanasia, and the circumstances of his suicide in 1983 cast a permanent shadow over his memory, since his wife, a much younger woman totally under his sway, joined him in suicide though she had many good years ahead of her.

In this prodigiously researched and satisfying biography, David Cesarani gives us a Koestler capable of epic heroism and low buffoonery, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in the same skin-capable also, it would seem, of repeated and abhorrent, even criminal abuse of the many women in his life. Cesarani's book has touched off a firestorm that shows signs of consuming whatever portion of Koestler's once-towering reputation has survived the paranormal dabblings that had already made him, in the eyes of many, something of a laughingstock. Cesarani has uncovered one entirely credible account of a rape by Koestler, perpetrated on the young Jill Craigie, the wife of Labour Party leader Michael Foot. He has also amassed enough inferential material to make his charge that Koestler was a "serial rapist" at least worthy of serious consideration. Amend that last accusation to "serial abuser" and even Koestler's most indulgent partisans will have to return a guilty verdict. And so at Edinburgh University, where Koestler's considerable estate has created an academic coven of occultists, his bust has been removed from display in the psychology department's concourse after protests from advocates for rape victims.

Some, though certainly not all, of those most dramatically outraged by Koestler's behavior are motivated by a preexisting antipathy to Koestler's career and ideas, particularly his anti-Communism, and are practicing what our own First Abuser has denounced as "the politics of personal destruction." Still, if Cesarani's revelations are accurate, Koestler's conduct, if made known, would have landed him in jail even in the most benighted era.

But let it be remembered also that Arthur Koestler was a great man, both in the reach of his aspirations and the grasp of his achievement. He possessed in full measure a hero's moral and physical courage, which he exhibited on countless occasions to rescue victims of the political madness of our violent century. Among those rescued were several of the women he had earlier abused (who had remained quite friendly with him, even after he had dropped them). Daniel Patrick Moynihan once remarked of presidents that he had known six of them, and that up close, none of them was very pretty. The same can probably be said of most men and women of unusual talent and accomplishment. It certainly applies to Cesarani's Koestler.

Born in Budapest in 1905, Koestler joined the German Communist Party in 1932, first assigned to the underground. Then he toured Russia producing agit-prop journalism, worked in Paris with that genius of propaganda, Willi Muenzenberg, and reported the Civil War in Spain, where he was imprisoned and narrowly escaped the firing squad.

Stalin's purge trials provided the proximate cause for Koestler's quitting the Party in 1938. He also rejected the "ossification" of Communism, as Communists had to conform to a rigid, paranoid orthodoxy in which the "Trotskyite-Nazi conspiracy is gradually beginning to occupy for us the role The Protocols of the Elders of Zion occupies in the minds of the Nazis." He complained, too, of the suffocating grip of Party discipline on his writing.

Koestler's effort to explain his break with Communism led to his greatest artistic achievement, Darkness at Noon. Recently ranked, for what such rankings are worth, as the eighth-greatest novel of the century, it is the story of an old Bolshevik unjustly sentenced to death for counterrevolutionary treason. His interrogators lead him to concede that, according to the revolutionary ethic he still embraces, he cannot value his individual life over the needs of the Party. He agrees that he must accede to the Party's demands, even to the point of signing a false confession that includes a denunciation of a similarly guiltless "opposition." Before death he has a vision that reveals the infinite value of every human life, his own included, and the realization that he and the Party had "been running amuck-the running amuck of pure reason."